Line up of Standalone Compression Utilities

I did not benchmark BZip2. I did not have the patience to decode its installation
instructions.

NT, W2K, XP, W2003, Vista, W2008, W7-32, W7-64, W8-32, W8-64, W2012, W10-32 and W10-64
has a built-in compact utility for storing files in compressed form in a transparent
way. You just use the files normally. You don’t have to use a utility to
decompress them first. You use it like this:

// compress a directory treecompact.exe /C /S:mydirtree

You can also compress and decompress directories with the GUI (Graphic User Interface)
explorer properties.

Compactness Comparison

I used a test set of files, the ones
I post to the mindprod.com website, less the zip files. My test suite contained
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), images, sound files,
jars and serialised java objects already GZIPped. I then compressed them in various
ways, choosing the maximum allowed compression. The best, most compact is near the
top. 7-zip is by far the best at compressing. It is free and easy to use, so you
might as well use it. The max-compression options take considerably longer than the
standard compressions. You would not used them routinely, e.g. just to prepare
backups. I think though it is time to start recognising 7-zip as the leader in
compression and start at least offering that format as an alternative for downloads.
Not only is 7-zip the best compressor has the simplest GUI
to use of all the compression utilities,

Comparison of compactness of various compression utilities

Comparison of Compactness of Various Compression utilities

Utility

% of original size
(smaller is better)

size in bytes
(smaller is better)

notes

7-zip

42%

37,357,861

in PPmD Ultra mode. Best compression. However, other
compression algorithms are almost as good and are quite a bit faster.

7-zip

42%

37,826,519

in LZMA (Lempel—Ziv—Markov chain Algorithm) Ultra mode

7-zip

44%

39,134,141

in Bzip2 Ultra mode

WinZip Double Zipped

46%

40,774,398

double zipped. archive with compression turned off, then zip that zip with
maximum enhanced deflate. The end result is a zip inside a zip, possibly a bit
confusing for the recipient.

WinRar

55%

49,176,236

in RAR (Roshal Archive) best
mode

WinZip

58%

52,370,193

in non-compatible, maximum enhanced deflate

PKZIP

59%

52,635,830

in maximum compression mode. This is barely better than the standard
compression. This is the PkWare the originators of the PKZIP format.

Jar.exe

68%

52,653,468

no manifest,Java version 1.6

Windows Compact

91%

81,433,854

Windows built-in compact

Original

100%

89,558,283

Size before compression

These comparison results are not as important as you may think for two
reasons:

You can’t post files compressed with proprietary algorithms on the web or
people will have trouble unpacking them. You need to make provision that the
receivers of the files have the corresponding decompress program.

Various super-compression techniques take considerably more time than the
standard zip. In most cases the saving in space won’t be worth the extra time
to prepare the zips.

Speed Comparison

I ran each of these utilities in its default
compression strength. The fastest is at the top. WinZip was considerably faster than
the competition. This is what I use for preparing zips for my website. All these
tests were done on Win2K with 512 MB RAM (Random Access Memory),
and at Athlon XP 2000+ 1.7 GHz processor.

Comparision of speed of various compression utilities

Comparison of Speed of Various Compression utilities

Utility

% of best speed
(bigger is better)

time in seconds
(smaller is better)

% of original size
(smaller is better)

size in bytes
(smaller is better)

Reads
*.zip?

notes

WinZip 9

100%

46

59%

52,508,437

in default mode. Fastest of all, by a wide margin. It has
the most difficult user interface. It is also the one I am most familiar with.
Very easy to get the wrong files or wrong level of qualification. No tree view
of the zip file structure. I encountered files it thought were empty. It gave
no error message.

PKZIP

82%

56

59%

52,665,195

in standard compression mode. This is the PkWare the originators of the
PKZIP format.

Jar.exe

68%

1:08

59%

52,653,468

Sun Java jar creator 1.6

WinRar

41%

1:53

57%

51,221,269

in RAR mode. Easiest to understand user interface.

Windows Compact

43%

1:47

91%

81,433,854

Windows built-in compact

Original

38%

2:02

100%

89,558,283

n/a

Time for a simple copy. Size before compression. Astoundingly, Microsoft is
so incompetent it takes them longer to do a simple file copy than it takes for
others to compress the files.

There are several compression utilities, but so far, I have been unsuccessful in getting the compression utility authors to implement
these two features:

Optionally, if files disappear, they should be removed from the archive on update. This way you can maintain a zip mirror
of a set of files for efficient zip backup. I had to write BackupToZip to get this feature. I have temporarily withdrawn it.

Treat *.jar files as just another archive that you can examine and update.